new page from Google

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

May be competing with the visual search from Microsoft.

 

Pictures from the downtown visit

From the Top of the Mark, we just visited

Looking down the street

Roof Garden above the Tonga Room

Grace Cathedral Bronze doors

Building Reflections on California Street

Pictures another way

From the Marin Highlands

From the edge of the Presidio, the old military base.

From the same point, just zoomed less.

Golden Gate Bridge 09

Well, the uploader for pictures is having an error today, so I will return in a while with a link of some kind.

Here is a link, this is a new setup, so let me know if you have problems.

Pictures to share, click here

visual allegory for travel

saw this when I went out for a walk this morning, most likely it came from the Sausalito Art Festival

Labor Day 09

We got up early so we could get some breakfast in Sausalito before the Sausalito Art Festival started.
We found this place after a bit of looking.

They had a wait to be seated line, but we found 3 seats at the counter and watched as they produced some wonderful breakfast food. In addition to the great hash browns they also made French toast by cooking a dripping chunk of bread on the grill and then deep frying it.

Then on to the Festival. Being billed as the number one Art Festival in America we thought we might be getting into something, and we did. The show was large and well juried. The artists who came from all over the US, (even Bloomington) had a wide range of medium and expression. There was an interesting ripple in the crowd due to the focus on the anniversary of Woodstock. This picture is of the main stage, where they had some headliners getting ready to appear, we did not stay that long.

The first thing we saw after we got through the gates was a gentleman named Seamus with a wonderful accent who offered us Mimosa's to get going with our day, but we had had such a good start at Fred's that we declined. The secondary stage got to rockin a little later with a swing group out of Petaluma.

The organization was flawless, partially due to the fact that this was the last day of a 4 day run, but probably mostly due to the staffers. These people were gathered in a staging area, and I thought it interesting that the staff shirts had their tasks in large letters on the back of the shirt.
By the time we left around noon, the place was so crowded it was hard to walk around, and driving out of town was the best direction to be going.

After that we headed up to Sonoma to check out the cheese and visit some wineries. Sonoma was exteremely busy so we headed up a back road to Glen Ellen and visited the Benziger winery. We left there and headed home through the Napa valley after climbing and descending the area that separates the Napa and Sonoma valleys on a very twisty two lane road.

We finished the day after discovering that Rickeysrestaurant‎ was closed at Maya Palenque.
Good friends and good food.

Bodega Bay

We went up the coast to http://www.innatthetides.com/default.aspx?pg=tideswharf&rp=map
Watched some Sail Surfers ripping the waves, saw some seals, and had a great meal. Afterwards we drove back through the scenic countryside, through Sebastopol and Petaluma.

Photo by Julie of Angel Island from the car on the sea wall in Sausalito.

We had the rental place set up for a car, but when we got there, they did not have many cars, and a lot of people waiting.  The guy standing there asked I would do a full size RV, and what we ended up with was a Suburban with 7 miles on it, for the price of the car.  We figure we justified spending the money on the gas, by saving the money on the rental.  But we'll see how it ends up when we total out. 

3 friends at the Spinnaker

Our friend Barbara treated us to an evening at the Spinnaker in Sausalito. It sits in the harbor with a view towards Angel Island and the Bay Side of SF. The food was wonderful, and made even tastier by the moonlight on the water, and the ferry boats and traffic in the bay.